Self into Silence
The news was particularly bloody today and set my mind spinning, and so I escaped for a while on my bike, headed towards a local town far into the countryside at the end of the day, near sunset, to forget things for a while, and feel the cooling air, the swarms of insects and hear their noises and the sound of the gravel road and the wind over my ears.
After a few minutes of uneasy ruminating, my muscles tightened and accelerated the pedals and the grinding chain and the wheels. My heart gradually rose in its rhythm and the thinking and the noises slowly receded and I entered into what I had come to know as the silent land1 — this space where thoughts dissolved like the melting sun and I flew.
At this time of day, when the sun rested and the earth relaxed and began to smell, I moved through waves of fragrances — I smelled the crisp green grass when I descended into cooler air, I smelled rotting vegetation, decomposing animal corpses, the methylated gas released from the loosening soil. I breathed it all in and circulated it within my cells, and I also relaxed into this rotting morass like the bio-bound gravity-bound earth-bound creature I was, and in this descending state a kind of prayer bubbled up within me, spontaneous, sad little swampland prayers, rotted and hopeful, made possible perhaps by this self-forgetting and the mind's lostness in this emptiness.
Was it escape? I sometimes wonder, but really I think there is no real escape. We all live, fail, fall, and rot in some way, we try to live until we are expended, exhausted and then able to pray, and then the door opens, and we can finally rest and decompose self into silence.
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Martin Laird, Into the Silent Land↩